OpenAI Gym Gives Reinforcement Learning A Work Out

The big problem is that reinforcement learning is a difficult technique to characterise. Put simply an RL system learns not by being told how close it is the the desired result, but by receiving rewards based on its behaviour. Of course this is largely how we learn and if it can be made to work efficiently it promises us not just effective AI but new knowledge. For example AlphaGo taught itself to play Go and in the process discovered for itself approaches to Go that humans had ignored.